


i threw stones at the stars (but the whole sky fell)

by Nazezdha321



Series: Character Studies (sort of) [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Character Study, a whole host of ocs for the purpose of story, and profanity, i might have put some in here, not really sure how to tag this, oh implied sex too, this fandom needed more gay so, victoria deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 09:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26849500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nazezdha321/pseuds/Nazezdha321
Summary: "Victoria opens her mouth to say something, but Ward’s gun is aimed at her head, and she knows what happens next."---A Victoria Hand character study, from before her birth to her unfortunate death that I still haven't forgiven Ward for and likely never will.
Relationships: Phil Coulson & Victoria Hand & Isabelle Hartley & Melinda May, Victoria Hand & Maria Hill
Series: Character Studies (sort of) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1817902
Comments: 32
Kudos: 25





	i threw stones at the stars (but the whole sky fell)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nyx_aira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyx_aira/gifts).



> Thank you to Aira for prompting this on tumblr, and I hope that this fulfills your need for more Victoria Hand! And thank you to Kat for cheering me on through this fic.
> 
> As for warnings... I wasn't sure how to tag this. Contains descriptions of abuse, brief drug overdose, and character death(s). Lots of blood. Accidental self harm. So don't read this if any of that triggers you. If I missed a trigger, tell me in the comments and I'll add it ASAP. 
> 
> Enjoy! (as much as you can with the amount of angst that's in this lmao)

They’re up in the air, a few hours away from the Fridge where Victoria intends to make sure that John Garrett has the worst few years of his very, very short life. She thinks of all the dead, the agents she trained, the agents she commanded, the agents she will never know. The agents who must’ve died with the HYDRA secret. How many, she wonders? How many dead people justify a cause?  _ (Ten, twenty, thirty? A hundred, a thousand?) _ At what point does one break? At what point do the means simply outweigh the end? 

All questions she will probably never get the answer to. John Garrett is a son of bitch, but he’s a well-trained son of a bitch. There’s nothing anyone will get of him that will help them defeat HYDRA. 

“Course is locked in,” reports her pilot, not deterring Victoria from her thoughts as she stares at the smug face of her former colleague. How many deaths, she wonders, did her personally carry out?  _ (And how many times did he have the chance to bury a knife in her back or a bullet in her skull?) _

“Good,” she replies curtly. She stares at Garrett. 

He’s the quietest she’s ever seen him. Does he have nothing to say, or does he simply not care enough to speak? What’s running through his head? His death? His torture and then death? SHIELD doesn’t take too kindly to traitors and by extension, neither does Victoria. 

“He’s not telling stories now, is he?” she asks Ward. Garrett was his SO. She remembers her own with fondness, a trait that she doesn’t often show. What’s going through Ward’s head right now? Is it his loyalty to SHIELD or his loyalty to Garrett? Is it the consequences Garrett will face or is it relief that he will face them? “You know what I’m thinking, Agent Garrett? I’m thinking the icebox at the Fridge is a little too comfortable for you. Maybe we should put you a little deeper underground. What do you think, Agent Ward? You shot the wrong clairvoyant before. Care to shoot the right one?” 

Ward stands quietly. He hasn’t said one word this entire ride. She can’t help but wonder what there is left to say. He loads his gun, efficiently and without taking his eyes off Garrett’s face. She stops looking at Ward and starts looking at Garrett. 

Victoria jumps slightly as the gun is fired, but it isn’t at Garrett. It’s at one of her agents. 

It’s then that she realizes she has made a terrible, terrible mistake. 

Thoughts run through her head faster and faster as she’s frantically coming to conclusions and this is not clean and orderly and precise like things are. Like things should be. This is messy and dirty and chaotic. 

HYDRA runs on chaos. 

Victoria is slammed into the floor by a bullet to the chest. She sees blood, red like her hair  _ (and this is irony, isn’t it?) _ This is the real end of SHIELD. What a fool she was to think that was the extent of HYDRA within her forces. What a fool she was to think Garrett wouldn’t recruit his own soldiers. And damn him for it. Damn them all. 

She thinks of that day Ward was recruited. How she was going to go, but she got that call, and Garrett went instead. Now the boy she was supposed to save looms over her, and she can’t see anything in his eyes. She tried for years to perfect that art. And here she is. Being killed by one who has. 

Victoria wants to say something, but the only thing running through her mind is her failure. 

_ (Victoria. The goddess of victory).  _

“What are the righteous but those who have lost?” her father used to say. She hated it when he said that. She hated him. 

Hate is what made HYDRA who they are. But maybe it’s what made SHIELD, too. SHIELD, HYDRA. Two sides of the same coin. She only wished she knew that before she flipped it. 

Victoria opens her mouth to say something, but Ward’s gun is aimed at her head, and she knows what happens next. 

\---

Victoria Hand became when two newlyweds, a surgeon and an actress, made a reckless and impulsive decision in the heat of the moment that they would both regret for most of their lives. 

“I think we fucked up,” Rosaline Hand muttered later that night. 

Tristan Hand raised an unimpressed eyebrow. 

“I mean it, Tristan! You know I’m not on birth control, we’re just tempting fate!” 

  
“We’ll be fine, you’re just being dramatic,” Tristan said.

Rosaline, in all her gracefulness on stage, and Tristan, in all his care in the operating room, were neither graceful nor caring in their marriage. It lasted a whole month before the police sirens and a couple of years before things ended with shattered glass and a baby girl with no mother. 

Rosaline made many, many reckless and impulsive decisions in her life. All of which lead her to eventually die of a drug overdose in her tiny home in Hollywood without ever seeing her daughter again. 

Victoria died hating Rosaline, not for never visiting or calling or caring, but for putting her into this  _ (dark, cold, lonely)  _ world in the first place. 

\---

“ _ Gloria! _ ” a very, very pregnant Rosaline screamed, smashing the glass in her hand on the floor. 

“ _ Veronica! _ ” Tristan shouted back, smashing a glass of his own and hurling a nearby plate at the refrigerator for good measure. 

The police had already been called by the neighbors twice this month over Rosaline and Tristan’s continued fighting. Rosaline, in her condition, blamed it on the hormones. Tristan blamed it on his mother’s health, or her lack of support, or her. 

Everyone was to blame for the young couple but themselves. 

“She’s my daughter, and I’m naming her Gloria!” Rosaline yelled. 

Tristan flung a spoon into the window. It cracked, just slightly, so that the only person who would notice was the little girl who would end up cleaning the dishes _ (and everything else)  _ every night for years after Rosaline left them. “She’s my daughter, too!” 

“You aren’t the one who’s  _ birthing  _ her!” 

“I’m the one paying for her since  _ you  _ won’t get a  _ goddamn  _ job!” 

“I can’t! I’m pregnant!” 

“ _ With my baby! _ ” 

Rosaline threw a china bowl that had been her great-grandmother’s. She would insist later that it had been broken for weeks, but no one would believe her.  _ (There was nothing else to justify the broken pieces of her family on the floor).  _

\--- 

Rosaline had the baby on December 27th. “It’s a Christmas miracle!” exclaimed the nurses, as if the holiday season hadn’t already passed. As if Rosaline believed in miracles and not mistakes. As if  _ Victoria,  _ the compromise name, wasn’t just another reckless, impulsive decision. 

It was Tristan’s mother who would wind up taking care of baby Victoria on most days after that. Tristan’s mother who knew how doomed Rosaline and her son were from the start. Tristan’s mother who embroidered red poppies on the baby blankets while she rocked Victoria to sleep. 

But once Victoria was two years old, she wasn’t spending much time at her grandmother’s. They had just moved, after all. She’d go over the summer, but her grandmother lived a several hour drive from the new apartment. 

“Mommy, where is you go?” Victoria asked, her brown hair swaying side to side as Rosaline packed a hurried bag, shoving clothes and all of the money she could find, as well as drugs from her stashes. 

“Nowhere, Gloria,” Rosaline said absentmindedly. She got Victoria’s name wrong most days. Her daughter just watched her quizzically, wondering if everything was okay. She tugged on the shoulders of the poofy green dress Rosaline made her wear, wanting to find her blankie because she was cold. The heat had been shut off to the apartment after Rosaline used Tristan’s last few paychecks for a plane ticket and a downpayment on a new house far from here.  _ (But never far enough, in Rosaline’s opinion).  _ He would find out in the next few hours. 

“Mommy,” Victoria began, but Rosaline spun around and held a hand to her face. 

“Goddamnit, you and your questions. You don’t talk unless you must, you understand?” 

Victoria nodded. She bit her lip so tears wouldn’t slip down her face, a trick she had learned during the last few fights downstairs as she escaped into her closet and held her hands tight over her ears so she wouldn’t hear the smashing and the yelling. If she couldn’t make it there, she hid inside her mother’s big wardrobe and didn’t come out for hours, surrounded by the silky fabrics and sparkly things that Rosaline hadn’t worn in ages. 

Later, as her mother got into the yellow car and Victoria watched from the little window, she saw the raindrops start to race down the windows. She was betting on the one by the corner, almost hidden by the shadows in the dark room. It didn’t win and Victoria felt a little hole in her heart where something used to be. 

\---

Victoria was seven and about to go to the bus stop for school when her father reached out a hand toward her. “Vic,” he slurred, and Victoria shuddered because she  _ hated  _ that nickname. “Bottle on the counter, Vic.” 

She glanced at the empty liquor bottle, and then at the clock. She had to go to school, now. “There’s nothing in it,” she said. 

“Don’t be condescending, Vic. Bottle. Now.” 

“There’s nothing in the bottle,” Victoria said, hearing the word over and over in her head:  _ condescending, condescending, condescending _ . “I’m going to go to school now.” 

“Bottle!” Tristan roared from the couch, and Victoria ran to the counter and thrust the bottle into his hands. She slammed the door behind her, backpack clutched in her hands, and ran as fast as she could to the bus stop, praying she wouldn’t be late and have to run all the way to school. 

“Please, please, please,” she whispered. “ _ Please _ .” 

\---

_ “Please, please, please,” she whispered.  _ “Please.” 

_ Victoria was four and trying her hardest to will her mother to come back home. Tristan was out with his friends and there was a spider on the wall and Victoria was so, so scared of spiders.  _

_ “Mommy, I need you,” she whispered. The apartment was dark, and Victoria sat petrified against her bed frame, watching as the spider at the other end of the room moved an inch, scuttling around with the kind of grace that Rosaline used to, fast and blurry and finished in the blink of an eye, leaving you scrambling to remember what you had just seen.  _

_ “Leave me alone,” Victoria warned. She held out her hand as if that could do anything, but the spider stopped. She thought it was looking at her.  _

_ They sat like that all night, at a stalemate, until Victoria worked up the courage to put her hand down. The spider did not move. She smiled slightly. It didn’t leave.  _

_ “My name is Victoria,” she said softly.  _

_ Not even an inch.  _

_ “I’m four years old.”  _

_ Nothing.  _

_ “I’m supposed to be sleeping, but you’re awake. Why are you awake?”  _

_ The spider didn’t say anything back, but Victoria didn’t expect it to.  _

_ She kept talking to it until the apartment door swung open and voices bounced off the walls, suffocating the small space. Voices that Victoria would have to pretend she didn’t hear in the morning. The spider ran away, disappearing behind the door.  _

_ Victoria went back to sleep.  _

\---

  
As usual, her prayers went unanswered, and she got up the street just as the bus was pulling away. Victoria ran, waving her arms at the school bus. “Wait for me!” she screamed. “Wait!” The driver kept pulling away, even as one of the other kids spotted her out the back and yelled at him to stop. 

Victoria ran faster, trying to keep up. “Stop!” she yelled. She could see more of the other kids yelling and gesturing to her through the windows, so she ran faster  _ (and faster and faster and ).  _ Her ballet flats kicked up mud all over her new tights. She didn’t care. 

The bus slowed down, and the kids cheered as Victoria staggered onto the school bus. 

“You were  _ so fast _ , Vic!” Maddie, one of the girls in her class, cried. Victoria glanced at Maddie and the other kids with their wide smiles and amazement and  _ did you see how fast she ran?  _

Victoria didn’t have the heart to tell her that running was easy as long as you were running away, so she sat down in the seat beside Miguel and said, “Please don’t call me Vic. It’s condescending.” 

\---

“The roof? You can’t make it up that  _ tree _ , Vic,” sneered Eliza. Victoria was nine and certainly able to climb to the roof of the elementary school. She had climbed out of the window in her bedroom before, and her grandmother had her scaling trees to get down fruit every summer. 

Victoria also had experience breaking the rules. What were rules, anyway? Control? _ (Victoria wasn’t going to be controlled by anyone).  _

“You want to bet?” she asked. 

“Bet what?” Eliza, queen of the playground and the fourth grade, asked. 

Victoria glanced at Eliza’s jacket. Well-made, expensive. Good for winter. And it was red, Victoria’s favorite color. “Your jacket.” 

Eliza glanced at it. “Fine, but if I win, you have to do all of my homework for a month and give me your cookies at lunch for the rest of the year.” 

Cookies came with school lunches and Eliza brought hers from home. They were the bright spot in Victoria’s day. But bright spots weren’t a necessity and homework was easily done. “Deal.” 

They shook on it like people did in movies, and Victoria started to plan out her route. The sandbox was right next to the corner of the building. The playground monitors would be watching but she could be quick if she scaled the support beam like one of her grandmother’s apple trees. From there, it was just a matter of grasping on to the edges and not falling into the sandbox, where she’d either be dusty or break someone’s neck _ (or break her own).  _

Victoria ran. 

Strike one, because a playground monitor saw her. 

“Hey, no running!” 

The other kids ran after her because no way were they going to be subtle when they could witness what was going to be the stupidest thing anyone had ever done in their tiny living memories. 

Victoria deftly climbed up the beam, her tiny legs wrapped around it. Her eyes were a little fuzzy now that she was looking at it up close - why did her eyes have to choose  _ today  _ to be bad? - so she shut them, and let her fingers drift toward the edge of the roof. 

“Watch out!” Kaylee, Victoria’s reading partner, shouted. Fingertips brushed her leg - it must have been the playground monitor, trying to get her down. And it was almost enough to send her off-balance, but not quite. 

Her fingers grasped the edge of the roof, just enough to pull her off of the beam and leave her dangling. Victoria opened her eyes and, against her better judgment, looked down. They were chanting her name, even Eliza, while more and more teachers tried to get past the horde of screaming children in the sandbox. 

She swung side to side, her feeling her weight settling in her toes and she moved. Just as they were going to grab her ankles, she swung her left leg up and rolled onto the flat roof. 

Victoria jumped up and screamed in delight while her peers dispersed, still cheering, and the teachers told her to  _ don’t move a muscle, Victoria _ and  _ sit down, Victoria  _ and  _ be quiet, Victoria _ . She did none of those things as someone finally brought a ladder and the headmaster climbed onto the roof to get her down. 

“You’re in trouble,” he said. 

“You have no idea,” she assured him. 

\---

Victoria was eleven years old, sitting on the steps outside their apartment, waiting for the second that she would have to go inside. The neighbors talked about the little girl who wore black glasses and sat on the roof and whose father was a successful surgeon who picked himself up out of an alcohol addiction years earlier. 

You’d never know, they’d say, looking at the girl and her father, that there was trouble there. You’d never know, they’d say, that there had been fractures in that household long before the windows broke a year ago. Some of them thought it was lovely, how much that girl loved her father. Some of them thought it was horrifying, that she’d never said a thing. 

_ (None of them asked what Victoria thought).  _

The sun was just about to set, hanging low on the horizon and lighting up the little windowsill where Victoria put glasses of water with red poppies floating in them all the way across. She grabbed her key and opened the door to the apartment. 

“I’m back,” she called, shutting the door quietly behind her. Tristan was standing at the table, carefully cutting an apple into small slices. 

“How was school?” he asked, not glancing away from the task at hand. 

“Good,” Victoria replied. 

“Come here, I want to show you something.” 

\---

_ “Come here, I want to show you something,” Rosaline said, opening her arms in a rare gesture of affection toward her child.  _

_ Victoria, entranced by her mother’s strange change of heart, and longing for the assurance that it would last forever, crawled beside her. Rosaline set down her nail polish colors, soft pinks and bright whites and dark navy blues that looked like the night sky.  _

_ “Go ahead, pick one,” she encouraged, and Victoria looked at her tiny fingernails, then at the colors. Her mother reached over and grabbed a glittering lime green. Victoria chose red, to match the flowers on her dress.  _

_ “Mommy, you don’t like green,” Victoria said, frowning at the nail polish. Her mother almost never wore green, much less this shade.  _

_ Rosaline smiled. “Yes. But do you know why I picked it?”  _

_ Victoria shook her head.  _

_ “Because none of the other actresses wear this color of nail polish,” she told her daughter. “And they don’t own me. It’s my little rebellion, darling.”  _

_ Victoria wouldn’t understand what was so rebellious about nail polish until her mother died without any on. Instead of consoling her father, or hiding in the closet while he drank, she went to the bathroom and cut off all of her hair with safety scissors. She buzzed her scalp with Tristan’s razor and went to bed with the weight of her mother’s death off of her shoulders.  _

_ Everyone would ask her why she did it, but it was only to her grandmother that she would reply, “Because they don’t own me.”  _

_ \--- _

“Hold this,” Tristan instructed, holding out the knife. Victoria took it hesitantly and held it like a pencil. He shook his head. “No. Like this.” He demonstrated with a fork, and Victoria followed suit with the knife. 

They were quiet until Tristan brought over an orange from the glued-together china bowl that had been a summer project a year ago for Tristan and Victoria to complete together. She never understood why they couldn’t have just bought a new one, or used a bigger bowl that held more fruit. 

“Peel this using only the knife. Don’t damage the fruit inside,” he said. 

Victoria made a slit in the top, making a move to open the tear more with her hands when Tristan grabbed her wrist gently. “Only the knife,” he repeated. 

“It’s just an orange,” she protested. 

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem,” her father replied. 

She peeled it like her grandmother peeled an apple, but with considerably more effort and slipping and pieces breaking off one by one instead of in a neat line all the way across. She slit her thumb, but her father didn’t seem to care as blood seeped into the orange flesh. 

“Clean,” Tristan said, gently taking the fruit when she was done. “Orderly. Precise. As things should be. It’s hard, right?”

Victoria nodded. 

“And you cut yourself in the process. Blood’s not very clean.” 

Victoria trembled with fright but held her shoulders high. 

He patted her shoulder. “Never mind that. Who are the righteous but those who have lost?”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so Victoria put her thumb in her mouth and let the metallic taste of her own blood take over until her heartbeat was calm. She put on a band-aid and forgot nothing, not the knife, not the lesson, and not the cut.  _ (She never ate another orange). _

\---

When Victoria was fourteen, she fell in love. 

But first, she fell down a flight of stairs and dropped her backpack down another, directly into the path of a blue-haired black girl with inquisitive eyes and a stack of books taller than she was. 

“Watch your step,” the stranger advised, a grin peeking out behind the spine of another book that Victoria would never read. 

“Thanks,” Victoria muttered, picking herself up off the floor. 

“Take some of these and I’ll help you pick your stuff up,” she offered. Victoria’s backpack had broken, its cheap zipper snapping and spilling, her papers, pens, and abundance of hair ties everywhere. 

Victoria took a few off the top, and the girl set the rest down. “You have blue hair.” 

“Better hair than hands,” she agreed, holding out her own. “Cassie.” 

Victoria took it. “Victoria.” 

“Why’d you fall?” Cassie asked as they gathered the various items. 

“Gravity.” 

“Damn physics.” 

“Better physics than psychics,” Victoria told her, smiling slightly. “Cassie’s short for Cassandra, isn’t it? The psychic - “ 

“ - psychic Greek lady who saw terrible things happen but was cursed never to be believed,” Cassie finished. “Correct.” 

“And you are?” Victoria prompted after a moment of silence in which they put everything back in her backpack. 

“Not,” Cassie answered simply. “See you, Vic.” 

The words Victoria said almost as an impulse -  _ don’t call me Vic, it’s condescending -  _ now died on her lips, and instead, she tucked her hair behind her ears, readjusted her glasses, and left, Cassie’s words ringing in her ears as she went. 

She met Cassie again when she cut through the park to get home from school. Cassie was sitting on top of the monkey bars, kicking her feet out as she stared at the sunset. She patted the bar beside her before Victoria could say a word. 

Victoria dropped her new backpack and climbed up the ladder, then swung up onto the bars beside Cassie. “What are you doing?” Victoria asked. 

She shrugged. “I’m bored.” Cassie looked over at her. 

“If you’re so bored,” Victoria began, but Cassie cut her off. 

“Want to flip?” 

  
“Flip off of the monkey bars that were deemed a safety hazard last month?” she asked. “Absolutely.” 

Cassia laughed and put her hand next to Victoria’s as she grasped the metal bar. “You ready?” 

Victoria positioned her hand like Cassie’s on the bar. Together, they flipped forward, dropping at just the right moment to the wood chips below.  _ (And it felt like flying).  _

\--- 

Hands held on the roof at the old elementary school where Eliza had challenged Victoria to climb years ago. 

Dancing in the streets at night, all leather jackets and switchblades and  _ if you touch me, I’ll kill you.  _

Dying Victoria’s hair with red streaks when her father was out at work, bleach and chemicals and laughter ringing in the empty home. 

Sand in between their toes when they went to the beach, collecting shells and trying to catch the waves. 

A kiss on the cheek, and then on the nose, and on the back of Cassie’s hand. 

And then a real kiss, all shivers and cold moonlight and memories waking up to sunlight and realizing they were still burning, still lighting up the sky. 

_ (And a few more kisses after that).  _

Movie theaters and popcorn fights and getting in trouble and not caring about any of it because Victoria was with Cassie, and for the first time, she was happy. Real happiness, too, without a sense of impending doom because there had to be an end. 

They were forever, after all. Forever never ends. 

_ (But this time, it did).  _

\--- 

_ “You can’t make me!” Cassie screamed. They couldn’t make her go, they couldn’t take her away, not from here, not from Victoria. Especially not to leave for some job halfway across the country.  _

_ “Cass, honey - ”  _

_ “I’m not leaving!” she yelled, her voice igniting a fire as she ran to her room. Her footsteps echoed in her heart as she slammed the door with a tear-filled face. She pulled on her blue hair in panic. What was she going to do? What were they going to do?  _ _  
  
_

_ And Cassie, in her rage and fear and hurt and desperation, ran away.  _

_ She grabbed her backpack and her jacket and she ran because she had to make it to Vic’s. Just go to the top of the hill, make a right, and then a left, and whatever you do, don’t go down that alleyway even if you think it will save some time.  _

_ (She did anyway, and no one saved her this time).  _

_ (She didn’t make it to Victoria’s. And she never made it home).  _

\----

Victoria was sixteen years old when she graduated high school. A prodigy, her high school teachers called her. A troublemaker, her elementary school teachers murmured. Prodigy, troublemaker. She outgrew those lives before she had a chance to wear them, see how they fit, how they flattered her pale skin, how they clashed with the bright red highlights in her hair  _ (because they don’t own me _ ). 

She wasn’t her father, rushing into medical school to become a surgeon. _ (She was clean and orderly and precise like Tristan taught her to be, but she wasn’t her father) _ . She wasn’t her mother, wearing a thousand faces only to hide her own.  _ (She was rebellious and lonely and beautiful like Rosaline taught her to be, but she wasn’t her mother) _ . And she wasn’t Cassie, reading her books and flipping off of monkey bars and wanting to escape.  _ (She couldn’t forget what the cost of it was. That was what Cassie taught her). _

Nevertheless, she got offers from medical schools and arts programs and athletic departments alike. 

“What should I do?” she asked her grandmother as they sat on the porch one day. 

“Whatever makes you happy.” 

“Grandma.” 

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Does surgery make you happy? Does acting?” They did not. Both of them disgusted her. What were they, at their core? Digging bullets from places where bullets should never be and becoming so skilled at being someone else that you forget who you were? 

_ (Ironically, she’d be doing both before long).  _

“No,” Victoria said. 

“Neither, then.” 

“But what do I do if I don’t become a surgeon or an actress?” 

Her grandmother stared into the sky, watching the clouds take shape and then unravel across the horizon. “You do the best you can.” 

SHIELD approached Victoria almost four days later at her grandmother’s funeral, which her father had chosen not to attend. “Are you Victoria Hand?” they asked, wrapped in black trench coats like shadows. 

  
Part of her wanted to say no. She was not Victoria, the compromise. Victoria, the curious. Victoria, the quick and the scared and the troublemaker and the concise and the rebellious and the prodigy all at once. She was not her grandmother’s granddaughter, not since they lowered her six feet under the ground  _ (not since they lowered them both).  _

“Yes,” she said, and felt the steel in her spine. 

\---

_ “Victoria Hand?” Natasha Romanoff will ask quietly.  _

_ “Do you know any other Victorias?” May will reply, and they both know she does, but Nat declines to say anything. “Is there any family for me to notify?”  _

_ “Did you already ask Maria?”  _

_ “Yes.” They both know how many checks Natasha has done on her old SHIELD partners since she became a superhero. If Maria couldn’t find anything, then all leads point to Natasha.  _

_ “No. Are you holding a funeral?”  _ _  
  
_

_ “No. Too many bodies to bury, and too many that we can’t. She’d hate it anyway. Just a quiet grave and I have it on good authority her name will be put on the Wall of Valor,” May will tell her.  _

_ It’s as close to a proper goodbye as they’ll get. “I’ll send flowers.”  _

_ May will smile slightly. “Poppies?”  _

_ “Of course.”  _

_ \--- _

  
  


“It was you,” Victoria said, glaring at her friend. 

“What was me?” May asked innocently, hiding her smile almost enough, but not quite. The entire Academy was pranked. They had to shut down classes for an entire day while teachers methodically combed the school for traps. Victoria had an entire gallon of glitter dumped on her head that morning. And most of it was still in her hair because the shower pipes were filled with sugar water. 

“Admit it, May,” Maria groaned. “You are the only person in the entire campus who managed not to get pranked with one thing or another.” 

Victoria might not have been showing it, but she was grateful. This was what she thought she could never have. This was friendship, and for the second time in her life, Victoria wasn’t alone  _ (how long would it last?).  _

That didn’t mean she wasn’t pissed off, though. 

She climbed onto the table, and Maria helped her push May up there with her. “Admit it,” Victoria challenged, her voice carrying across the courtyard. Cadets and teachers alike looked up from their conversations and books and whatever else they were doing. A slow smile spread across May’s face. 

“I did it,” she confessed simply. 

They stared at her, speechless. 

And then one of them stood up and started clapping. Before her, a sea of applause erupted, most of it from cadets, but a few nods of appreciation for the feat May accomplished from the teachers joined in. 

“Want to help me next time?” May whispered. 

“I’ll consider it.” 

\--- 

All cadets were required to have a basic understanding of medicine for emergencies in the field. Victoria was sure that was at least a part of why she was recruited  _ (clean, orderly, precise).  _ They expected her to excel. She did, but not because of her father. 

“Hand. What’s the first step?” asked their professor. 

“Call it in,” Victoria answered. 

He nodded. “Hill?” 

“Do not move the patient unless you are in immediate danger,” Maria replied. 

“May?” 

“Stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure,” Mel read off of Phil’s notes. He rolled his eyes at her but said nothing. 

“Hartley?” 

“Make note of any exit wounds or further injuries.” 

“Good. Coulson?” 

“Reassure the patient, try not to let them fall unconscious or go into shock.” 

“Garret?” 

“If they stop breathing, use CPR.” 

“Good job. Next week, we’ll partner up to have mock patients, so I’d study the material for clarification. Today’s guest lecturer…” 

Victoria tried not to think about Tristan, who was probably doing this same thing in the emergency room. How many people, she wondered, had he treated? How many bullets? And how many of them did he save? 

\---

_ “Victoria,” Maria said, raising her hands in a calming gesture. She and Mel had been worried for a long time about their roommate. “Look, you know the rules. No identifying marks, and bright red streaks in your hair are a giveaway.”  _

_ “I’m not redying my hair,” she replied, glaring ferociously.  _

_ “We’re on your side,” Melinda said. “Vic - ”  _

_ “Don’t call me Vic!” she exploded. After an awkward silence, she whispered, “It’s condescending.”  _

_ “If you don’t take the exam, you fail,” Maria said. “We don’t want you to fail, ‘kay?”  _

_ Victoria sighed, dropping onto her bed. “I’m not taking them out,” she mumbled into her pillow.  _

_  
_ _ “What could be more important than this, Victoria?” Mel demanded. “You’ve been working for this for six years! You gave up everything for this! And now you’re throwing it away because of your hair?”  _

_ “It’s not like you,” Maria agreed. “What’s up?”  _

_ Victoria said nothing.  _

_ Melinda stood, frustrated that she couldn’t fix the problem. “If you aren’t going to talk to us, plead your case to the Director. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.”  _

\---

“You must be Miss Smith.” The man was tall. He wasn’t the boss. He was here to intimidate her. 

“I am,” Victoria said, standing up. She wasn’t so easy to intimidate. 

“If you’ll follow me,” he replied, offering a hand. 

She took it with all the grace of Rose Smith, an American actress whose estranged daughter was a spy for the CIA. Her cover dictated that she be refined, poised, and careful. Not used to speaking in front of people. Terrifying, but in the right way. 

Victoria wondered if they’d given her this cover because of her familiarity with Rose’s situation, although Rose’s quiet demeanor was more like Tristan than Rosaline’s. Still, an actress? With a spy for a daughter? Victoria didn’t believe in coincidences, especially when the agency had access to her family history. 

“The GRU is concerned,” he explained on the way. “You are American, your daughter is CIA… we are surprised that you would reach out to us with an offer? Would that not endanger your child?” 

“I have as much loyalty to her as I have to the Americans.” 

“And how much is that?” 

“None,” Victoria replied. 

The irony was upon her now, as she went into a ballroom with these people in their fancy dresses and suits, dancing in their overly complicated fashions, drinking alcohol so expensive she could buy a small house in New York City with one bottle. These were people her mother strove to be, with the kind of money and power that she dreamed of. 

And here Victoria was, playing a girl named Rose, thousands of miles from home. 

She downed a glass of champagne and got back to work. 

\--- 

“He’s in a juvenile detention center in Massachusetts,” Maria said. “Your orders are to bring him in. He’s an angry kid. Dropped out of the military, drove back home, and set it on fire. Parents are charging him, and his brother wants the court to try him as an adult. He’ll win, of course.” 

  
“And you’re giving me to him because?” Victoria asked. 

“Because we think you can get him in, and well,” Maria replied. “Come on. He’s practically screaming for the Academy to knock him into shape.” 

Victoria paused. “Where in Massachusetts?” 

“Plymouth. We have a Quinjet ready to take you.”    
  


She nodded and turned around to leave Maria’s office when a hurried agent walked in. “Oh! Agent Hand. The Director needs to see you.”    
  


“Can it wait? We’re on a schedule here,” Maria said. “It’s wheels up in twenty.” 

“It’s about your father, ma’am. He’s passed away,” the agent reported. 

Victoria sat down.  _ (In another world - )  _

“He’s ready to take your call, Agent.”  _ (In another world, she didn’t - )  _

Victoria made her decision. “If you could send someone else? Garrett might get along with the kid, he was a pyro.” 

Maria nodded. “Of course.” 

_ (In another world, she didn’t take the call).  _

\--- 

Victoria opens her mouth to say something, but Ward’s gun is aimed at her head, and she knows what happens next.

She wishes she could say that she wasn’t afraid, but she is. 

She thinks about the poppies and the music and her friends and being on the roof of her elementary school. She thinks about the Academy and her grandmother and the orange. She thinks about Cassie, for the first time in a long time. 

She thinks about the broken china bowl on the table and closes her eyes so no one else will have to. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been my labor of love for the past few weeks as I struggled to understand Victoria's character. I do love how this turned out in the end, and I hope all of you - especially Aira <3 - love it too. 
> 
> Today is also my one year ao3 anniversary. I look back on the first fics I posted and I am shocked at how much I've changed and grown. Thank you for being a part of it, whether this is my first fic you've read, or you've been cheering me on from the start. 
> 
> As always, kudos/comments make me the happiest in the world. Kick some ass today <3


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